


Indivisible and Unchangeable

by Steerpike13713



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Alien Cultural Differences, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/F, F/M, M/M, Multi, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-11
Updated: 2017-10-12
Packaged: 2019-01-16 01:42:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 4,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12332937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Steerpike13713/pseuds/Steerpike13713
Summary: The soulbond has been called the most basic of sentient drives. For many species, it is considered to mark the line between the sentient and the animal. It is the one constant to be found in the universe - all beings have a bond, and their relationship with that bond shapes their lives and fates in ways that most couldn't even begin to imagine. That's the prevailing wisdom, anyway. For the crew of Deep Space Nine, it's often a bit more complicated than that.





	1. An Ever-Fixed Mark

Benjamin Sisko’s Marks come in while he is still a toddler. _Kasidy_ on his left wrist in a round, clear, steady hand, and _Jennifer_ on his right, in such an energetic and illegible scrawl that it takes until he is thirteen for him to properly decipher it. When he is twenty-two, he meets a girl on Gilgo Beach with _Benjamin_ on her left wrist and _Kasidy_ on her right, and watches the writing as it inks itself into their skin. _Benjamin Lafayette Sisko_. _Jennifer Felecia Bell_.

Multiple marks are not precisely uncommon, although still rare enough to attract some questions, but they’re young and excited, a pair of new-minted Starfleet officers, an engineer and a scientist, both so full of questions it doesn’t seem like they will ever run out, and both too headlong in love to wait on their third to make a life together. They’re still ensigns when Jake is born, with characters it takes a few tries to identify as Ferengi on his arm and a bright, toothless smile, and the future seems bright indeed.

They still talk about their third, sometimes, in bed on quiet evenings.

“She’ll have a temper on her, I expect. Someone to keep you on your toes,” Jennifer says one night when Ben is lying next to her, spent and drowsing.

He musters a sleepy chuckle. “One of you isn’t enough? She’ll have to be stubborn, though.”

“How d’you figure?”

“Well, she’ll have to be able to stand up to you.”

Jennifer snorts, and rolls over to pin him down, “Like you’re any better when you don’t want to be persuaded.”

“I can listen to persuasion,” Ben says mildly, running his hands up her legs. “When it’s worth listening to.”

Even seeing _Jennifer Felecia Bell_ fade until it’s as pale as an old scar against his skin isn’t enough to make him accept it, at first. Not until the wormhole, and the Prophets, and the vision.

“I exist here,” he says, and sees Jennifer’s name still vivid against his arm, the way it is in dreams, even now.

It’s Jake who finds Kasidy, and neither she nor Ben quite knows what to do with it when _Benjamin Lafayette Sisko_ writes itself across her arm in Ben’s own draftsman’s hand. They don’t see eye to eye on any number of subjects, they fight about the war, and the Maquis, and her will is every bit as strong as his, every bit as strong as Jennifer’s. They’d have gotten along like a house on fire, he thinks, and his heart aches, a little, at the fact that they never had the chance to gang up on him.

“Tell me about her,” she says one night, not long after she comes back to the station. “Jen.”

Ben smiles, and if there is pain in it, there is warmth, too, in remembering. “She hated being called that. Too many jokes about ‘Ben and Jen’ from her friends.”

Kasidy snorts “Jennifer, then. I always thought of her as Jen, after the mark came in. Once I figured out what it said, anyway.”

Ben thinks it over, but it’s not his greatest strength. How can he compress down everything Jennifer was into just a few words, a few sentences? Talk about strength and spirit and the fire he’d had to watch go out of her eyes at the end? How much of that could he fit into words without making her into something entirely other than she was?

“Brilliant,” he says at last. “An astrophysicist.” Jennifer would have wanted him to mention that. She’d loved the stars more than anything, known more about them than anyone he’d ever met. Ben could talk for hours about history if he wanted, but Jennifer could outlast him and still not have told a fraction of all she knew. “The darkest sense of humour I ever heard.” That, too, had hurt after she was gone, when he kept hearing her voice in the back of his mind, the sort of grim, dark jokes she might’ve made about the situation if she were there. “She never let me away with anything if she could help it,” he says at last, fondly. “The two of you would’ve made an incredible team, there.”

“I’m sorry we never got to find out.”


	2. What The Prophets Have Joined Together

Nerys is fifteen, with a stolen Cardassian disruptor rifle in her hands and a heart full of bile and fury, when she feels the touch of the Prophets for the first time. Not in wonder and in joy, as some have told it, but in a pain as revelatory as beholding an orb. The disruptor goes off by accident, as her hands tighten on the trigger in reflex, pain whiting out her vision, making it impossible to focus on anything but the ache in her chest, the awful, searing, despairing knowledge that she is alone, quite alone, and will be so forever. She blacks out, in the end, from the pain, and is taken for dead. It’s only that which saves her life, and when she wakes, she is not altogether sure she is glad to be saved.

The first thing she knows is that her mate is dead. There is no physical sign of this, just as there was no mark of the bond itself. The Prophets’ gifts are clear enough without them. Still, Nerys can _feel_ the absence of the bond like a black hole within her mind, a sucking crater, an emptiness like an open wound. The second thing she knows is that she is alive. She stands, stiffly and mechanically and not altogether sure why, sees her disruptor is gone and the bodies of her friends around her, and stumbles back towards the rendezvous point. It is hours late, but she finds it, and heads back towards where their last camp had been made, to find it empty. It takes three weeks, in the end, for her to find the Shakaar Rebels again, scavenging to survive and staying out of sight, but she manages it. She does not think of her mate at all until she is asked what happened, and then it comes out of her in a torrent – the pain, and then when she came to the terrible knowledge of what must have happened.

Nerys tries not to think of her mate, after that. She did not think of her mate much before, if she is honest. They would meet when the Prophets judged it right, she had thought, and until then there were Cardassians to fight, a planet to liberate, a cause greater than herself. Better, really, that not meet until the war was over, or not at all, so that her mate need not grieve when the Cardassians finally killed her. Now, with the absence of the bond always with her, she looks back and thinks how terrible a thing it would have been, to inflict this loss on the other half of her soul.

By the time the war ends, the pain of loss has scarred over into something a little like an old war-wound, that aches with the approach of rain. Nerys has larger concerns – she has always had larger concerns – with the Federation depending on them and then the discovery of the Celestial Temple, the proof so many Bajorans have spent their whole lives searching for, that the Prophets still care for them, that Bajor has not lost their favour entirely, as even Nerys sometimes wondered during the darkest parts of the Occupation, when it seemed her prayers fell on uncaring ears.

And then, at twenty-six, she meets Bareil Antos. The Prophets’ teachings forbid relationships outside the bond as frivolous, superfluous. A perfect mate exists out there for each and every Bajoran that lives, so why waste time with anything less? It is not a belief that many in the Federation seems to share, when Doctor Bashir appears to be attempting to sleep his way across the entire station, and Dax, with her myriad of old Marks from previous hosts, seems to feel no compunction to be faithful to any of them. Nerys is Bajoran, though, and a faithful Bajoran at that, and really should know better, and Bareil is a vedek, with a mate still living, somewhere in the world. They part ways as friends and nothing more, and when Nerys grieves his death, it is as much for what never could be as what was.

And then, of course, there is Odo.

It has taken her years to know him. From Terok Nor to Deep Space Nine, and still she never realised, never knew, until events on Gaia bring it terribly into focus.

He loves her. He – or a version of him – has killed eight thousand people to save her life, and the worst of it all is that she is not sure that that strange, too-familiar Odo had not thought it a fair exchange.

Love, outside the Prophets’ gift, is said to be impossible on Bajor. Lust and love are easily confused, say the vedeks. One must trust in the Prophets, and only through that trust is true happiness possible.

Odo has no marks, no signs, and if there is any concept of a mate for him within the Great Link, he has never spoken of it. And he loves her.

It is easier than she expected, when the time comes, to choose him in return.


	3. The Insults of Fortune

That he has a Mark at all feels, sometimes, like adding insult to injury. A reminder that his parents circumvented fate itself to spare themselves the humiliation of having a son that didn’t measure up. When he found out what they had done to him, he had combed through family albums see if there had been any change, but there was none. Julian Bashir is not a man meant to exist. He is living, still, in the skin of a boy named Jules who died on the operating table. He has that dead child’s Mark on his arm.

He had been a dreamy adolescent, full of grand ideas and hopes and plans for his future. He had pictured his soulmate a thousand times – an alien, he knew already from the strange script, but what kind? Male or female or something else altogether? He was thirteen when he finally managed to identify the language as Kardasi, and searched through every database he could for a picture of a Cardassian that looked anything close to kind. At fourteen, he had a working knowledge of Kardasi, good enough, at least, to read the name and construct a hundred new fantasies about just who _Elim_ might be. A defector, he decided, maybe an exile, a refugee. A brave young individual whose principles would not let them stand by while atrocities were carried out by their own people. They would meet at a conference, or on the bridge of a starship, or on the planet where Elim’s ship had crash-landed as they fled a Cardassian patrol. Elim would be a man with a wicked smile and an expert knowledge of how to avoid detection from years of evading the Cardassian authorities, or a woman with bright blue eyes who could talk for hours about her favourite books and wouldn’t mind Julian chattering on just as long about his. He had been constructing yet another of these fantasies when his mother had called him through to the other room, when his parents had sat him down and explained to him the truth about what he was and why it was he had to be careful. After that, Julian tried not to think of the Mark, wore long sleeves and cuffs to cover it over, and when Palis pressed her lips to it and asked, teasing, if she should be worried, he made grand statements about love and fate and which mattered more and did not mean a word of them.

When he meets Garak, he cannot help the awful, joyous rush of feeling that rises in him, as Garak rests hands on his shoulders and digs his fingers in, and Julian feels something like liquid fire trace along the letters on his arm.

 _Elim Garak_ , it says, when Garak has moved away and Julian rolls up his sleeves and removes his cuff to take a look. He grins to himself for a moment, unable to help himself, and strokes the curves of each letter, committing them to memory, and is halfway to Ops to tell anyone, everyone, what just happened, because it’s too much for him to keep to himself before the realisation sets in.

Marks only display affinity, he knows. They do not cause it. And Julian…he doesn’t know who Jules would have been, had he lived to adulthood. He cannot imagine they have much in common. Even to reach Deep Space Nine, Jules would have had to work harder than Julian has ever needed to in his life. Jules would have had nothing to hide, no long-buried, lingering resentments, no careful scrutiny of every word and deed for fear that the least slip would give him away, because there would be nothing _to_ give away. That Jules would be Garak’s ideal mate, in a better world, does not mean that the same is true of Julian. And Garak…Garak had not reacted at all. Not to the touch, not to the sight, not to _anything_. Had it ever even registered, for him? Or was Julian too different, too far changed from the Jules Garak ought to have had for the bond to take?

All the same, when Garak suggests they meet for lunch, after the business of Tahna Los is over, Julian accepts, and when Garak suggests they make it a regular arrangement he agrees to that as well. They argue over Preloc and Sayers and Iloja of Prim, about Federation socialism and how it compares with the running of the Cardassian state. Garak is nothing like those long-ago fantasies - a thousand times better and worse at once in all manner of unexpected ways - and it seems, it seems the worst kind of taunt that Jules’ soulmate should be someone Julian liked just as well.


	4. A Process of Abrasion

For Miles, it is simple.

The letters on his arm are human, Japanese kanji. He doesn’t translate them. His mother has already done this for him by the time Miles is old enough to ask what the funny markings on his arm are.

“There’s a little girl out there called Keiko,” she says, ruffling his three-year-old curls with a bright smile, “That’s her name. You’re going to meet her, one day.”

“How will I know?”

“You won’t, at first,” his mother replies. “You’ll have to look at her arm – do you know what it will say?”

“Miles?”

“That’s just right.”

Miles scrunches up his face. “In words or in these?”

“Those are words too, Miles. But for her, I think it will be in letters you can read. That’s what the Mark is for, you know, to let you know who it is that’s meant for you. It wouldn’t work, otherwise.”

The Mark isn’t binding, exactly. Plenty of people marry outside the bond, or have other relationships before they meet their mate, and it’s a big universe, it’s entirely possible never to meet your mate at all. There are even plenty of people who never form romantic bonds at all, but just stay friends, or even bond within their own family. Everyone has one, though. Well, almost everyone. Commander Data doesn’t have one, Miles learns pretty quickly after he’s taken off the front lines and posted to the _Enterprise_. Most people would say that means he doesn’t have a soul, but Miles…well, Miles has seen friends die, and children killed by Cardassian forces, and the spoonheads’ eyes glowing red in darkness, and if even those bastards have bonds, clearly having a soul means something different to what Father Riley back in Kildavin used to say. It’s Data, in the end, who introduces him to Keiko.

It doesn’t go well. Actually, that’s an understatement. It is a _disaster_.

The whole thing starts with Data trying to experience human rituals, and someone – Miles doesn’t know who, but he’s inclined to think they’re probably the spawn of the devil anyway – had suggested he try bowling. He’d invited Geordi, Geordi had invited Miles, and Data had invited Keiko Ishikawa. By the end of the evening, Miles was absolutely certain that either fate had got it wrong or he was looking for another Keiko, because Keiko Ishikawa was the biggest pain in his arse that he’d met in all his life. She’d got on his case for every least little thing he did over the course of that evening, topped it off by beating him so comprehensively at bowling that Miles was going to have nightmares about her smug grin as she pulled off yet _another_ perfect strike for weeks, and he’d gritted his teeth and smiled and done his best to be polite. And if his best wasn’t all that great…well, who could really blame him, under the circumstances?

But, somehow, after that, it had become impossible to avoid her. On a ship the size of the _Enterprise_ , it ought to have been possible, but somehow, they kept turning up in Ten Forward at the same time, or sitting next to each other during ship-wide events, and it turned out they had a lot of the same friends, as well, so there was no way of avoiding one another. So, the first time Miles finds himself noticing something about Keiko – the way her face lights up when talking about her plants, say, or the fact that she has rather lovely hands – he just writes it off as some sort of warped trauma-bonding thing. She cares a lot about her work, had high standards, he could respect that. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly…well, neither does he, and somewhere along the line she seems to have stopped seeing him as a fool to suffer. It builds up, over time, all those little commonalities, until one day he doesn’t see her, and it feels wrong, feels like something missing, not to have Keiko Ishikawa rolling her eyes at him and beating him at every game under the sun.

The next day, he sticks his head around the botany lab door on his way into work.

“Hi, Keiko.”

A sigh and a raised eyebrow. “Hello, Miles.” She frowns. “Aren’t you going to be late for work?”

Looking back, years later, he’ll trace the moment he fell in love, or at least the moment he knew just how deep in it he was, back to that moment, those words. At the time, all he does is grin ruefully and ask.

“D’you want to go for a drink sometime?”

And when, about a week later in Ten Forward, their hands bump over their drinks and Miles feels fire tracing up the inside of his arm, sees the shock on Keiko's face and rolls up his sleeve a little more to see that new kanji are tracing themselves on his skin...then, it is less a revelation than a statement of fact, that he is hers.


	5. The Universal Constant

If Odo had borne a physical Mark, things might have gone differently. But then, if Odo had had a solid form, with arms and legs and head, things might have gone differently too.

He does not believe that his species had bonds. He has heard Bajorans talk about it, how it feels to have lost a bond, and to have an unrealised one. Humans are similar, though they talk about it less. It is incomprehensible to Odo, how these solids strain and yearn for each other, pulled like magnets towards each other in ones and twos and threes and other, larger groups, on some rare occasions.

“If that’s the case, your existence ought to have rewritten the book on symbolonology,” Doctor Bashir tells him earnestly, when Odo finally adheres to the absurd Federation regulation insisting he visit sickbay for a basic check-up so that his medical records, if he can be said to have such a thing, are on file.

Odo huffs at that, and does his best to ignore the doctor’s endless flood of chatter.

The prevailing belief among the scientific community is that any creature without a bond is no more than an animal. Odo knows. As such, speculation remains rife about what form his species’ bonding takes, now that it has been decided that he is, in fact, sentient. The present forerunner among those theories is that his shape will settle once he finds his mate, a supposition that Odo finds frankly insulting. Still, it is preferable to _not_ being considered as sentient, as he had been in the beginning.

The shocks had been bad enough. The vacuum chamber was worse. The protein decompiler worst of all. Even once he had been acknowledged as a creature, there had been the other demands. That he learn the Cardassian neck trick, which he had performed once and then never again once he had learnt what it was he had been asked to do. That he maintain a humanoid form for as long as possible, even after it started to pain him. Even so, it was preferable to what had come before. It had taken some years even after he had first taken humanoid form, until Odo had taught himself to speak, for Mora to acknowledge him as a thinking being. Odo still isn’t precisely sure why – Bajorans carry no outward sign of what they call the Gift of the Prophets, nor do Cardassians of their Revelation – but he carries the resentment with him always, hard and heavy as a stone.

In truth, he does not understand the appeal of these pair-bonds. Even meeting Nerys had not changed that. Not at first, at least. The various ways solid creatures find to fit parts of themselves inside one another have always struck him as both unsanitary and frankly rather ridiculous, and the flowers, chocolates and rather insipid poems they exchange in order to be permitted to engage in such behaviour are simply laughable. And then there is the rest of it.

He has never known Nerys without the grief of her mate’s death somewhere in the fabric of her. She does not speak of it very often, but it is there, in the way she tends to avoid looking too long at bonded pairs, in her quiet inwardness sometimes, in her stubborn refusal to engage in other partnerships. It is not precisely uncommon on Bajor, now, for people to engage in other partnerships. So many feel the Prophets have abandoned them that the Prophets’ Gift is no longer respected as the ultimate authority it once was. Odo did not previously care for this development. He neither approved nor disapproved. It simply was. All the same, it strikes him as irrational that the death of a person Nerys has never met has, at a stroke, cut her off from all other such companionship. He cannot tell if that is logic or jealousy. Perhaps it is both.

The Great Link is perhaps the first time Odo begins to understand what a bond might mean. That feeling of- of rootlessness, isolation, distance, that has been with him all his life, all at once gone. And in its place…there is no word Odo knows in any of the languages he has learnt among the solids to describe it. The comfort and the safety and the overwhelming love of the Great Link, the sense of being all at once a thousand times more than himself, a part of everything, touched by everything, aware of so much more than one artificial humanoid body can offer him. It is everything he could have hoped for, all the universe contained within one planet, the promise that he will never be alone again.

Of course, it cannot last. He pulls himself back, tells himself and the crew that Nerys is not the reason he is staying, and tries not to dwell on it more than he has to.

He has forsaken the nearest thing to a bond he will ever have for Nerys. It is unworthy of them both to resent the fact that she would never do the same for him.


	6. Xotso'cil

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Title is Tinsnip's take on Kardasi and means literally 'emerging-truth' but, more properly 'revelation'. It is also the Cardassian word for a rainbow.

If the Cardassian species had been designed to Tain’s specifications, no Cardassian born would ever have had a mate. Or, if natural selection must be so indelicate as to insist on pair-bonds, they ought to be something discreet, easily suppressed, easily removed. Instead, the only way to free a Cardassian from the traitorous urges of their own biology is to blind them, and that will not do at all. This most basic of primitive sentient urges has no part in the work of the Order, can be nothing but a liability and a distraction, and the nigh-unavoidable sentiment that surrounds the Revelation and the bond is even worse. It is rumoured, in the Obsidian Order, that Tain had his own mate murdered, years or decades ago, as a threat to his work. It is the sort of thing Garak can imagine him doing.

For himself, Garak does not believe he is missing much. Cardassia Prime is beautiful in a thousand shades of subtle grey, and the most brilliant colour could not make Terok Nor less of a prison. His colour-blindness is, perhaps, a drawback in his new profession, especially serving the Bajorans, who see colour all their lives and who claim to be called to their mates by the will of their Prophets. Still, it can be worked around. He might have been left behind out here, bereft of his own people, quite, quite alone, but he could be useful yet. The Federation is not so very difficult to gain information from - the whole Promenade is buzzing with word of their arrival, and even he, the lone, despised Cardassian left cannot escape the rumour mill. Humans – a people so ill-concerned with their own protection that they wear this most secret thing on their skin, open to the world – have never proven so very difficult before. The first time he sees words running up a customer’s wrist as he takes their measurements feels as much an invasion as the last stages of an interrogation, a stripped and beaten prisoner quivering before him, ready to give up friends and home and family if only it will _end_.

He has never seen Julian’s Mark, just as he has never told Julian that the first colour Garak ever saw was warm brown, threaded with green, spreading out into golden-brown skin and dark hair and the absurd, over-saturated blue of a Federation uniform. Garak had caught sight of him for a moment on the Promenade and then, his mind still dulled by the rush of endorphins, could think of nothing but making himself known to his mate at last. Cardassians are not known as a sentimental species to the rest of the quadrant, by which it is meant that they are not demonstrative. A Cardassian carries his heart, not on his sleeve but in his clenched fist, and so it has always been with Garak. Had he been in his right mind, he would have turned away, pretended to be unaffected, gone on with his life as if nothing had happened. For all the poetry, all the high claims made by poets and by the state itself, all the overwhelming sentiment surrounding the bond, no Cardassian would admit to being bonded outside their species. Many do not acknowledge it even outside their class. To a Cardassian of orthodox beliefs, the bond is always appropriate, always between enjoined pairs, always entirely convenient. The truth, any agent of the Order soon learns, if common sense has not already reduced orthodoxy to mere public performance, is much more complicated. Those dark eyes, that graceful neck, those slim shoulders. He was lost, he thinks, at first sight. They have never spoken of this, nor will they - Garak has tried delicately to weave words around to the topic a hundred times, and never quite managed it. Either Julian will raise his eyebrows and go haring off on another tangent too intriguing not to follow, or Garak’s own nerve fails him and he does the same. Because Julian must _know_. How could he not? A human’s Mark is not open to confusion or misunderstanding – Garak has seen enough of them, now, to be sure of that. Their mate’s name, in its longest form, written on the skin for anyone to see. It is the plainest thing in the universe, and Garak feels the sting of that keenly.

It doesn’t matter. Julian knows, and he has done nothing. That, on Cardassia, would be answer enough. Still, Garak keeps going. He weaves half-true stories, innuendoes, hints at all he has seen and done to keep the doctor coming to him, week by week. He makes perhaps a few too many allusions to colour when they talk – if only in the context of Julian’s utter lack of judgement in this regard – and at once despises and glories in the ignorance that means Julian can never know what it is he means.


End file.
